LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com)  A streak of light that apparently sparked several reports across Southern California was not considered to be a public threat, according to fire officials.

Over 40 reports from eyewitnesses around the Southland and statewide reported the sight to the American Meteor Society (AMS) around approximately 10:30 p.m. on Thursday night.

Residents from cities as far north as Sacramento, Pismo Beach and Santa Barbara and as far south as Malibu and Costa Mesa reported a brief tail of light  described as everything from blue to white to bright green in color  traveling in a east-southeast to west-northwest direction across the night sky.

The flood of reports prompted the Los Angeles Fire Department to respond on Twitter: We are in routine operations. There are no emergencies in Los Angeles related to the sighting of a bright light in our atmosphere.

I hear tell our arm of the milky way galaxy is passing thru another galaxy day-bree or such.. happens regularly, every few hundred millions years or oftener.. oh vell.. stuff happens.. has before and will continue after man is an after thought in cosmic terms. dust to dust..

I agree. It’s definitely better for the human race and the day to day goings on in the world if the vast majority of people were unaware of what goes on in the heavens above. I’m well aware that space is not an empty vast and cold void . It is in fact a very dangerous place with hundreds, even thousands of chunks of iron and big dirty snowballs(comets) from the size of a grain of rice to the size of Mt. Everest zipping around all over the place, anyone number of which comes close to smashing into our little speck of dust and water and someday, sooner or later is going to plow into us and that’ll be the end of Earth. Or we’re incinerated by the intense gamma ray radiation from a gigantic star going super nova or being swallowed by a Black Hole. That in itself will be catastrophic but what would be far worse is how five and a half billion humans will react when they realize theres only a few months or weeks left to live.

When you come right down to it, there are millions and millions of non zero probability things waiting to put us on the wrong side of dirt everyday, eventually one of those things will win, that's life, roll the dice :)

Our galaxy, The Milky Way is a fairly big one as these things go. It's light years long tendrils of gas and dust radiate out from the center like spokes in a wheel. On really dark nights, when there is no moon and depending on where you live with little or no light pollution you can see wisps of it. I believe we live in what would be suburbia, outward from the center in an area called the "Virgo Super cluster''. Trouble is though our galaxy and our sister galaxy Andromeda are heading towards each other at about 400'000 miles and hour. But at 3 million, 200'000 light years apart it'll be a while before it gets here.

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